Equipboard – Connecting Artists to Products

Ever want to use the same gear as your favorite artist? Equipboard is making that easier than ever before as the one-stop platform connecting artists to the best industry products by breaking down the gear, tools, and products used by artists, professionals, and influencers in their craft. Founded to connect musicians with the proper technology to create music – and quickly becoming the world’s largest community of musicians and their gear – Equipboard showcases products used by mainstream musicians to make it easy for artists of all levels to be inspired and easily shop the same gear as industry professionals.

In 2014, inspired Giulio Chiarenza and Michael Pierce launched Equipboard in Austin, Texas with the goal of learning what gear their favorite artists were using to create specific sounds. As musicians, Chiarenza and Pierce were always searching for how their favorite artists would create their music or capture a specific tone on a track. With that curiosity serving as the foundation, Pierce and Chiarenza ended up creating a platform for themselves. “Ultimately, we want to make it easy for musicians to find out how to make the sounds they want to create from the music and artists that inspire them.”

Originally starting as a site and community where users research artists and add/review music gear in-depth, Equipboard quickly evolved into a comprehensive platform where musicians not only find in-depth research on artists and gear, but can also find the best price for the gear they are interested in purchasing. Users can follow professionals and other artists for updates, save products to a wishlist, upload and tag their own music setup, and use the site’s price comparison tool so they know where to find the gear at the best price. Today, more than one million people worldwide visit Equipboard every month to find their next music gear, providing a purchasing power of over six million dollars in gear through Equipboard in 2020 alone. The community is now over 200,000 strong, with more than 15k+ followers on social media.

What’s next for Equipboard? As more musicians have moved online in the last year to create and collaborate, Equipboard has seen an increased interest in people wanting to learn music from online resources – especially in areas such as producing and learning how professional artists use their equipment. As the community amasses more and more data about music gear and usage, Equipboard is developing new features that will show common combinations of gear, and what genres are most commonly played with a given piece of gear. They have also developed a “Gear Score” – product rankings of gear by category that aggregates reviews from multiple sources – making Equipboard the ultimate one-stop-shop for research and purchasing when it comes to buying new gear. Founder Michael Pierce remarks on his hopes for Equipboard saying, “Equipboard wants to be the definitive destination to find the absolute best music gear tailored to your needs. We want to enable personalization based on your musical tastes, the genres you play, and your budget. We know gear discovery looks very different for a guitarist that loves Jimi Hendrix than it does for a bedroom producer inspired by Grimes. We are building a site around that philosophy with the individuals’ journey in mind.”

Both Chiarenza and Pierce share a background in music where they both pursued successful endeavors in their career. Chiarenza is a lifelong musician. He plays the piano, guitar, drums, and served a brief stint signed to a label as an electronic music producer.

Pierce bought his first guitar, a Fender California Series Stratocaster in Candy Apple Red, in 1998. He enjoys rock of all types, from classic to punk to metal. He has taken music lessons in piano, guitar, and trumpet over the years.